Masters Of War

Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build all the bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks. You that never done nothin' But build to destroy You play with my world Like it's your little toy You put a gun in my hand And you hide from my eyes And you turn and run farther When the fast bullets fly. Like Judas of old You lie and deceive A world war can be won You want me to believe But I see through your eyes And I see through your brain Like I see through the water That runs down my drain. You fasten all the triggers For the others to fire Then you set back and watch When the death count gets higher You hide in your mansion' As young people's blood Flows out of their bodies And is buried in the mud. You've thrown the worst fear That can ever be hurled Fear to bring children Into the world For threatening my baby Unborn and unnamed You ain't worth the blood That runs in your veins. How much do I know To talk out of turn You might say that I'm young You might say I'm unlearned But there's one thing I know Though I'm younger than you That even Jesus would never Forgive what you do. Let me ask you one question Is your money that good Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul. And I hope that you die And your death'll come soon I will follow your casket In the pale afternoon And I'll watch while you're lowered Down to your deathbed And I'll stand over your grave 'Til I'm sure that you're dead.------- Bob Dylan 1963

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

C.I.A. Delivers Cash to Afghan Leader’s Office - NYTimes.com: For more than a decade, wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags have been dropped off every month or so at the offices of Afghanistan’s president — courtesy of the Central Intelligence Agency. The C.I.A., which declined to comment for this article, has long been known to support some relatives and close aides of Mr. Karzai. But the new accounts of off-the-books cash delivered directly to his office show payments on a vaster scale, and with a far greater impact on everyday governing. Moreover, there is little evidence that the payments bought the influence the C.I.A. sought. Instead, some American officials said, the cash has fueled corruption and empowered warlords, undermining Washington’s exit strategy from Afghanistan.

CIA Bags O’ Cash Total Tens of Millions of Dollars, But Over $4.5 Billion Left Afghanistan in 2011 - Today’s New York Times carries a frank exposure of blatant moves by the CIA to curry favor with Hamid Karzai and high ranking members of Afghanistan’s government through direct cash payments brazenly dropped off at Karzai’s office: Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of these cash payments is that they seem to have been designed in large part to pay off Afghan warlords: And it’s not just any warlords who are being funded by this cash. We learn in the article that the current corruption pay for Rashid Dostum, who committed the largest single war crime in the Afghan war, is now $80,000 per month. And in the funding of warlords, keep in mind that they form the backbone of David Petraeus’ Afghan Death Squads Local Police under the “direction” of US special operation forces and the CIA. After particularly egregious behavior by one of these groups earlier this year, Karzai first expelled US special forces from Maidan Wardak province and then eventually backed off somewhat on that move. Today’s article suggests that Karzai is trying to play a major role in controlling these groups. Given the main topic of the article, we are left to presume that Karzai’s control is through the allocation of these CIA funds:

President Barack Obama is arguably the nation's top gun salesman. The "Obama surge," as the Wall Street Journal calls it (others call it the "Obama bubble"), appears to have increased gun sales in the U.S. by millions of units over his presidency.

The chart with the Journal story shows the sustained -- and rising -- bump.

Number of monthly background checks in the first three months of each year since 1998. Source: Wall Street Journal

(Reuters) - The parents of the Boston Marathon bombing suspects have retreated to a village in southern Russia to shelter from the spotlight and abandoned plans for now to travel to the United States, the father of the suspects told Reuters on Sunday. READ MORE

Top Afghan officials have been on the CIA’s payroll for over a decade, receiving tens of millions of US dollars in cash. Afghan President Hamid Karzai admitted to receiving the clandestine financial support, but dismissed the sum as a “small amount.”

A New York Times report has revealed that unparalleled corruption in the Afghan government has been encouraged by the US Central Intelligence Agency. Since the start of the decade-long war, CIA agents have delivered cash to Afghan officials in “suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags.”

“We called it ‘ghost money,’” said Khalil Roman, President Hamid Karzai’s former chief of staff from 2002 to 2005, adding that it “came in secret, and it left in secret.” There is no evidence that President Karzai was a recipient of any of the money, as Afghan officials claim the cash was distributed by president’s National Security Council, the report said

I will be flying Singapore Air for the second time when I travel to S/Korea next month. Not only do they rank #1, they are also the least expensive. Go figure. Plus they allow TWO pieces of free check in luggage of 50lbs. each. The man in the photo is handing out hot towels.That part of the service starts moments after the seat belt light goes off.The service is far above all others.They also offer a great vegetarian meal that can be ordered before take off. Happy flying and see you all in Korea. :-)

Concentrating the sun's ray onto solar photovoltaic (PV) modules requires walking the fine line between optimizing power output and not literally melting your very expensive super-high-efficiency solar cells. A team led by IBM Research seems to have found a way to push back the line. They have created a High Concentration PhotoVoltaic Thermal (HCPVT) system that is capable of concentrating the power of 2,000 suns onto hundreds of triple junction photovoltaic chips measuring a single square centimeter each (they even claim to be able to keep temperatures safe up to 5,000x). The trick is that each solar PV cell is cooled using technology developed for supercomputers; microchannels only a few tens of micrometers in width pipe liquid coolant in and extract heat "10 times more effective than with passive air cooling."READ MORE

In recent years millions of citizens across the Western world have taken to the streets calling for real democracy. These massive demonstration began in North Africa, but spread rapidly to Greece, Portugal and Iceland, and then to North America and much of the rest of Europe. The most popular slogan of this international movement, ‘We are 99%’ – borrowed from an article by the Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz[1] – encapsulates the widespread sense that governments are serving the interests of a tiny elite, over those of the broader public.

The idea that democracy is dysfunctional and is serving a wealthy elite is not new. In 2004 Collin Crouch published Post-democracy, one of the most inspiring books on this topic.[2] It summarizes several years of work and explains how in spite of the regularity of elections in the Western world, in practice politicians do not represent the majority of the population.

Crouch argues that the power of the working class followed a parabolic trajectory: After the Second World War, workers started to organise and press their demands though the agendas of labour parties. The height of their power and representation was achieved in the seventies, when states recognised their rights and provided substantial public services. The arrival of globalisation changed this post-war paradigm. Industrial workers lost their jobs, which were transferred to emerging economies, and multinational corporations began to acquire the tremendous power which they enjoy today. READ MORE

What is moral and what is amoral in the struggle for the transformation of society? 75 years ago Leon Trotsky wrote his masterpiece Their Morals and Ours, in which he explained that morality is one of the key ideological components in the class struggle.

“The ruling class forces its ends upon society and habituates it into considering all those means which contradict its ends as immoral. That is the chief function of official morality. It pursues the idea of the “greatest possible happiness” not for the majority but for a small and ever diminishing minority. Such a regime could not have endured for even a week through force alone. It needs the cement of morality.” (Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours, 1938)

The class struggle cannot be reduced to a question of mere economics and that is why Marxism deals with all spheres of life. Capitalism today finds itself in an organic crisis. It is an economic crisis based on the fact that capitalism as a system cannot take production forward. We have millions who are unemployed while factories and machines are standing still. And this is happening not because we do not need what could be produced, but because the capitalists cannot sell everything that the system has the capacity to produce and therefore cannot create enough profit for the capitalist class.

This crisis in the economy leads to a general crisis in society and a crisis in the regimes that govern society – state corruption, political scandals, sex scandals in the church and the illegal intrusion by the media into people’s private lives. In short, the crisis in the economy is also expressed as a crisis of morality.

Leon Trotsky

Their Morals and Ours

* * *

IN MEMORY OF LEON SEDOFF

* * *

Online version: From the magazine The New International,Vol.IV No.6, June 1938, pp.163-173. The New Internationalwas the theoretical journal of the Socialist Workers Party, supporters of the International Left Opposition in the United States.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

(Photo: Moyers & Company)Bill presents and introduces the short documentary "Dance of the Honey Bee." Narrated by Bill McKibben, the film takes a look at the determined, beautiful and vital role honey bees play in preserving life, as well as the threats bees face from a rapidly changing landscape. "Not only are we dependent on the honey bee for much of what we eat," says Bill, "there is, of course, a grace and elegance they bring to the natural world that would diminish us all were they to disappear."

Sunday, April 21, 2013

The complex societies that emerged from the division of society into classes also created societies that were wasteful, violent, stagnant and crisis prone. Understanding why is the key to how history happens argues Neil Faulkner.

A Mycenaean palace - an example of waste expenditure

The ‘urban revolution’ created the great imperial civilisations of the Bronze Age. But these civilisations were characterised by high levels of waste expenditure on war, monuments, and luxury - expenditure that was competitive and therefore cumulative.

The waste arose from the division of the world into antagonistic classes and rival states. And it resulted in super-exploitation of the peasantry that drained the economy of productive resources and reserves.

The imperial civilisations were therefore both economically stagnant and socially conservative. The classes and states which were their basis constituted formidable barriers to progress.

The Bronze Age impasse provides a useful occasion to pause and take stock. All the elements of complex society are now in place, so it is convenient to pose the question: how does history happen?

Saturday, April 20, 2013

The revelation that the family of the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings was from Chechnya prompted new speculation about the attack as Islamic terrorism. Less discussed was the history of U.S. neocons supporting Chechen terrorists as a strategy to weaken Russia, as ex-FBI agent Coleen Rowley recalls.

By Coleen Rowley

I almost choked on my coffee listening to neoconservative Rudy Giuliani pompously claim on national TV that he was surprised about any Chechens being responsible for the Boston Marathon bombings because he’s never seen any indication that Chechen extremists harbored animosity toward the U.S.; Guiliani thought they were only focused on Russia.

Giuliani knows full well how the Chechen “terrorists” proved useful to the U.S. in keeping pressure on the Russians, much as the Afghan mujahedeen were used in the anti-Soviet war in Afghanistan from 1980 to 1989. In fact, many neocons signed up as Chechnya’s “friends,” including former CIA Director James Woolsey.

Author John Laughland wrote: “the leading group which pleads the Chechen cause is the American Committee for Peace in Chechnya (ACPC). The list of the self-styled ‘distinguished Americans’ who are its members is a roll call of the most prominent neoconservatives who so enthusiastically support the ‘war on terror.’

“They include Richard Perle, the notorious Pentagon adviser; Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame; Kenneth Adelman, the former US ambassador to the UN who egged on the invasion of Iraq by predicting it would be ‘a cakewalk’; Midge Decter, biographer of Donald Rumsfeld and a director of the rightwing Heritage Foundation; Frank Gaffney of the militarist Centre for Security Policy; Bruce Jackson, former US military intelligence officer and one-time vice-president of Lockheed Martin, now president of the US Committee on Nato; Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute, a former admirer of Italian fascism and now a leading proponent of regime change in Iran; and R. James Woolsey, the former CIA director who is one of the leading cheerleaders behind George Bush’s plans to re-model the Muslim world along pro-US lines.”

The ACPC later sanitized “Chechnya” to “Caucasus” so it’s rebranded itself as the “American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus.”

The ideology, or political project, of Zionism which underlies the creation of the State of Israel had, in fact, a Christian origin rather than a Jewish one, as writings can be found dating from the 1500’s, written by Christian clergymen in England advocating the migration of Jews to the Holy Land.

The migration of Jews to Palestine was also advocated by Napoleon Bonaparte.

The first Jewish presentations of Zionism were written by Moses Hess in 1862 and 20 years later by Leo Pinsker, both of the Russian Pale, with each writer advocated a separate state for Jews.

Twentieth century Zionism was initiated by Theodore Herzl who, likewise, advocated a separate state for Jews in his book in his book, Der Judenstaat, written in 1896. One year later he formed the World Zionist Congress which held its first meeting in Basel Switzerland in that same year.

What to do with the Arabs present in the prospective Jewish state dominated the thoughts of the founders of Israel from Herzl up until the actual expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948.Thus Herzl stated:

“[We shall] spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”

Thus the concept of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians was introduced.

It is not rocket science, if you want to create a state exclusively of Jews, mostly European, in the heart of the Middle East, then you must first get rid of the Arabs.

In 1928, Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder of the Revisionist wing of the Zionist movement, which advocated the revision of the British Mandate for Palestine, to include the east bank of the Jordan and some of present-day Egypt, Jordan and Syria, and which was the progenitor of the present-day Lukud party, wrote, of the Palestinians, in his booklet, The Iron Wall, that no people were ever willing to give up their land to another people through mutual agreement and that the colonization by European Jews of Palestine must be prosecuted by force and against the will of the indigenous people, and must be executed behind an iron wall of bayonets, using his metaphor.

By the 1930′s, ‘transfer’ of the Arabs was the unanimous preference of the founders of Israel. So-called transfer committees, headed by Joseph Weitz, Director of Land Management for the Jewish Agency, were set up explicitly for the purpose of studying ways of ‘transferring’ the Arabs out of Palestine.

At the beginning of 1948, despite 50 years of land purchases, Jews only owned 6% of the land of Palestine. By the year’s end, the Israeli army controlled 78% of Palestine in a process of ethnic cleansing that saw the destruction of 531 Arab towns or villages and 11 Arab urban areas, with massacres, large or small, at almost all of those towns or villages, the almost complete looting of Palestinian property and wealth, including looting of the banks, confiscation of Palestinian homes and property, businesses, fields and orchards.

The Palestinian people lost everything. Those who survived the massacres lost their careers, their means of livelihood, only to find refuge in tent cities set up by the United Nations which were later to become squalid refugee camps of cinder block buildings dotted around the Middle East.

By just checking the time line, one quickly disposes of the 60 year old Israeli propaganda myth that the pre-state of Israel was innocently minding its own business when it was attacked by five armies of surrounding Arab states.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians began on November 30, 1947 in Haifa when the Jewish army under David Ben Gurion, along with the Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, under Manachem Begin, began shelling the Arab sections of that city. The ethnic cleansing of the Arabs of Haifa was completed by April, 1948 when shelling by the Jewish forces forced Haifa’s Arab residents to flee toward the harbor where they attempted to board boats in order to escape. Thus the Arabs of Haifa were literally ‘pushed into the sea’ by the Jewish forces. Many of those fleeing were drowned when he boats were overloaded and capsized.

In March of 1948, David Ben Gurion finalized and distributed Plan D to his officers, which was a program for destroying and depopulating Arab villages and eliminating any resistance. Already, by that date, already 30 Arab villages had been depopulated of Arabs.

On revealing paragraph of this document states:

“These operations can be carried out in the following manner: either by destroying villages (by setting fire to them, by blowing them up, and by planting mines in their rubble), and especially those populations centers that are difficult to control permanently; or by mounting combing and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the villages, conducting a search inside them. In case of resistance, the armed forces must be wiped out and the population expelled outside the borders of the state.” READ MORE

A historical perspective on the economic stagnation afflicting the United States and the other advanced capitalist economies requires that we go back to the severe downturn of 1974–1975, which marked the end of the post-Second World War prosperity. The dominant interpretation of the mid–1970s recession was that the full employment of the earlier Keynesian era had laid the basis for the crisis by strengthening labor in relation to capital.1 As a number of prominent left economists, whose outlook did not differ from the mainstream in this respect, put it, the problem was a capitalist class that was “too weak” and a working class that was “too strong.”2Empirically, the slump was commonly attributed to a rise in the wage share of income, squeezing profits. This has come to be known as the “profit-squeeze” theory of crisis.3

Monthly Review played a key role in introducing a radical variant of the “full-employment profit squeeze” perspective in the United States by publishing, as its Review of the Month in October 1974, Raford Boddy and James Crotty’s seminal article “Class Conflict, Keynesian Policies, and the Business Cycle.”4 This article highlighted the well-known fact that wages and unit labor costs normally rise near the peak of the business cycle, signaling the collapse of the boom. The authors went on, however, to suggest that the increase in the wage share at full employment accounted to a considerable extent for the major economic decline then occurring. “Capitalists,” they wrote, “have more than their class instinct to tell them that sustained full employment is manifestly unsound…. [T]he maximization of profits makes it necessary to avoid sustained full employment.” In doing so they contrasted their views to those of the great Polish Marxian economist Michał Kalecki, along with Josef Steindl and Howard Sherman.5

For Kalecki, the power of labor to increase money wages—although present to a minor extent in the normal business upswing—was not a significant economic threat to capital even at full employment due primarily to the pricing power of firms. Hence, if the system neglected consistently to promote full-employment through the stimulation of government spending this was not to be attributed to economic reasons per se, but rather to the political threat that permanent full employment would represent to the capitalist class. With “the sack” no longer available, the overall social power of the capitalist class would be diminished. The “rise in wage rates resulting from the stronger bargaining power of the workers,” he observed, “is less likely to reduce profits than to increase prices and thus affects adversely only the rentier interests. But ‘discipline in the factories’ and ‘political stability’ are more appreciated by the business leaders than are profits. Their class instinct tells them that lasting full employment is unsound from their point of view.” It was in this context that he introduced his famous notion of the “political business cycle,” whereby the capitalist state would alternate between promoting full employment and balanced-budget austerity, generating a “controlled under-employment.”6

In sharp contrast to this argument of Kalecki’s, Boddy and Crotty claimed that as the economy approached full employment a rising wage share was generated, sharply threatening capitalist profits themselves, and leading to structural economic crisis. The “economic effects of the business cycle,” they contended, then serve to “reinforce the socio-political aspects stressed by Kalecki.”7 For these authors, as for most economic analysts, the principal cause of the mid–1970s slump was a wage-induced profit squeeze. The notion of a profit squeeze arising as the economy approached full employment was therefore turned into a more general theory of economic crisis and even stagnation.8

The late 1970s and ‘80s saw the triumph of monetarism, supply-side economics, and other forms of free-market conservatism or neoliberalism. Establishment economics reverted to pre-Keynesian austerity views, resurrecting Say’s fallacious Law of Markets that supply creates its own demand—previously discredited by Keynes (and before that refuted by Marx). From a Say’s Law perspective, the capital-accumulation process could not falter of itself but only as a result of external trade union or government interference.

All of this meant the restoration of the fundamental economic ideology of the capitalist class. As early as 1732 Sir William Pulteney had declared in the British House of Commons: “It is now a universal complaint in the Country that high Wages given to Workmen is the chief Cause of the Decay of our Trade and Manufacturers; our Business then is, to take all the Measures we can think of, to enable our Workmen to work for less Wages than they do at present.”9 So deeply ingrained are such views in the world of business and finance that one influential financial strategist, Eric Green, global head of research for rates and foreign exchange at TD Securities, went so far as to contend in 2012—in the midst of the current period of high unemployment, slow recovery, and increasing income disparity—that U.S. corporations were being threatened by a “labor-cost squeeze on their profit margins,” which “could slow future job gains.”10

But if adherence to a profit-squeeze perspective is naturally to be expected on the right, the same is hardly true for the left. Nonetheless, a number of notable radical theorists insisted in the mid–1980s that the “possibility” that the neoliberal strategy of wage repression might prove successful in reviving long-term accumulation could not “be ruled out altogether.”11 More recently, in an attempt to explain the historical-economic roots of the Great Recession, a 2009 article in Dollars and Sense argued that it was sheer economic necessity that drove capital in the Reagan period to overturn the “full employment profit squeeze…. Like the New Deal of the 1930s, the Reagan era laid the groundwork of a new set of relatively stable framework institutions. The so-called neoliberal social structure of accumulation, monstrous though it was, functioned as a framework for capital accumulation and economic growth for nearly three decades.”12

Some economic analysts on the left, however, rejected the profit-squeeze view from the start. Although they had given prominence to this perspective by publishing Boddy and Crotty’s article, Monthly Review editors Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy belonged to the same broad Marxian theoretical tradition as Kalecki and Steindl. For these thinkers the main economic contradiction of monopoly-capitalist accumulation in the post-Second World War period was seen as lying on the demand side rather than the supply side, reflected in a tendency to underutilization of productive capacity associated with problems of surplus absorption endemic to the system.13 In this view the vast actual and potential economic surplus (surplus value) generated within production under the regime of monopoly capital exceeded the outlets for capitalist consumption and investment. The result was a tendency to economic stagnation manifested in slow growth, high unemployment, and excess capacity. Here the problem was the opposite of profit-squeeze theory: capital was too strong, labor too weak.

In this perspective, the prosperity that marked the post-Second World War years was seen as a temporary, historical departure from the normal state of stagnation that characterized accumulation under monopoly capitalism. The so-called golden age of the 1950s and ‘60s could be attributed to a number of special historical factors, including: (1) the huge consumer liquidity built up during the war; (2) the rebuilding of the war-devastated European and Japanese economies; (3) Cold War military expenditures (which included two regional wars in Asia); (4) a second wave of automobilization of the U.S. economy; and (5) a vast expansion of the sales effort.14 By the late 1960s, however, most of these historical stimuli had waned. Without new epoch-making innovations on the scale of the steam engine, railroad, and the automobile, and without new props to private accumulation, the economy would increasingly be mired in a condition of long-term slow growth.

If the monopoly-capitalist economy managed nevertheless to avoid a deep stagnation in the 1980s and ‘90s, it was not because of the advent of a new stable “framework for capitalist accumulation” in the Reagan period, but because of a financial explosion that had begun in earnest by this time, drawing upon the enormous economic surplus in the hands of capital. What Sweezy was to call “the financialization of the capital accumulation process” thus operated as a countervailing influence that lifted the economy—which was also boosted by increased military spending.15 But the debt overhang resulting from financialization, Magdoff and Sweezy observed, would eventually be so great that it would overwhelm the state’s ability to intervene effectively as a lender of last resort. The bubble would burst, and a deep stagnation would arise.16

These two perspectives, the profit squeeze theory and the theory of “overaccumulation” and stagnation, represented very different assessments of the 1974–1975 crisis and of the likely long-run trajectory of the U.S. economy.17 As it turned out, empirical trends were not kind to the profit-squeeze approach. Not only has the deepening economic stagnation of the last four decades been accompanied by a declining, not a rising, share of labor in income, but also there are reasons to doubt the significance of an increasing labor share even in the context of the years immediately leading up to the 1974–1975 crisis. Rather the small, but perceptible, rise in labor’s share of income in the late 1960s and early ‘70s has been shown to be nothing more than the result of a brief expansion of the share of government employment in the economy. There was no significant wage squeeze on profits in the private sector in these years.18 What was thought to be a mountain turned out to be a molehill—or less.19

These empirical weaknesses of the profit-squeeze theory are to be viewed against the larger background of its general incompatibility with the Marxian theory of accumulation. This can be seen in the critiques of the profit-squeeze perspective developed by Marx and Kalecki and the more straightforward socialist strategic outlooks they were able to promote as a result. The main thrust of Marxian crisis theory has always been opposed to the profit-squeeze view, which tends to dampen the aspirations of the working class. In this regard what Marx called “the political economy of the working class” is far superior to the political economy of the capitalist class.20

(Photo: Marjie Kennedy / Flickr)Flashpoints—those unexpected events that movements gather around, when everything is accelerated, exciting, and energizing—fizzle. Whether they fail to gain traction, or splinter off to catalyze multiple new efforts, movement events serve an important function: they are short­lived and inspiring.

At the same time, they are moments of immense opportunity when we can make strides and pool our collective power. The cooperative movement is experiencing a string of these moments now, and is burgeoning with renewed activity. I see this first­hand as a co­-owner of the Toolbox for Education and Social Action (TESA), a worker­-owned cooperative that participates in many co­op networks. We’ve facilitated hundreds of co­op workshops around the country, and taught thousands with our resource Co­opoly: The Game of Cooperatives.

It’s our philosophy that cooperatives enable direct democracy and local control over the economy. As participants in the co­op movement, we help to turn flashpoints into lasting social change. Fortunately, the path to a community-­controlled economy is well­ worn, and the adaptive responsive networks of the movement are buoying this energy. Over decades, these movement-based networks have quietly built support structures to transition us to a new economy. And with renewed demands for economic justice, they are springing to life.

The spokesman for the Saudi minister of interior General Mansour Turki (2R) is given a tour alongside other media representatives of a new centre for the rehabilitation of suspected "terrorists" and potential al-Qaeda recruits in Riyadh.(AFP Photo / STR)

Saudi Arabia hopes to put imprisoned Al-Qaeda militants on the right path and make them drop their thoughts of jihad by offering them spa treatments, exercise and counseling at a new luxurious rehabilitation facility in the capital, Riyadh.

As part of the program de-radicalization program, inmates will be able to relax in the center in between sessions with counselor and talks about religion, reports AFP.

The Riyadh rehab center is designed to accommodate 228 prisoners: 19 inmates in each of the facility’s 12 buildings.

The facility spreads over an area equivalent to around 10 football pitches (over 10 hectares) and includes an Olympic-size swimming pool, a sauna, a gym and a television hall. The prisoners will also have access to special suites where they can spend time with visiting family members. Besides that, as a bonus for good behavior, they could get a two-day break with their wives.

The center was created by the Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Center for Counseling and Care - established seven years ago to rehabilitate extremists imprisoned during a Saudi crackdown on the local branch of Al-Qaeda. The prince himself survived a suicide bomb attack in 2009, which was claimed by Al-Qaeda.

“Just under 3,000 [prisoners] will have to go through one of these centers before they can be released,” Interior Ministry spokesperson General Mansur al-Turki told the agency.

Local and international media representatives are given a tour of a new centre for the rehabilitation of suspected "terrorists" and potential al-Qaeda recruits in Riyadh.(AFP Photo / STR)

Another similar facility has already been opened in the western port city of Jeddah, while three more are planned for different parts of the kingdom.

The Riyadh center though is the first one to offer jailed Al-Qaeda members – or the “deviant group,” as they are referred to by the country’s authorities – a lap of luxury as a boost to reconsider their beliefs.

It is planned that during the day prisoners will attend seminars on religious affairs.

“In order to fight terrorism, we must give them an intellectual and psychological balance... through dialogue and persuasion,” said the director of the rehabilitation centers, Said al-Bishi.

So far, some 2,336 Al-Qaeda prisoners have been through Saudi rehabilitation schemes, he said. No more than 10 per cent of former inmates rejoin extremist groups, Bishi noted, adding that such proportion is “encouraging.”

Local media representatives visit the dining room during their tour of a new centre for the rehabilitation of suspected "terrorists" and potential al-Qaeda recruits in Riyadh on April 9, 2013.(AFP Photo / STR)

A local media representative looks at a washing machine during a tour of a new centre for the rehabilitation of suspected "terrorists" and potential al-Qaeda recruits in Riyadh on April 9, 2013.(AFP Photo / STR)

However, the program does have its opponents, especially given that some there have been some high-profile returns to the ranks of jihad. For instance, Saeed al-Shehri - a former Guantanamo Bay prisoner who went through a rehabilitation program in Saudi Arabia - upon his release traveled to Yemen and became deputy leader of Al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula.

Liberals are particularly unhappy with the religious content of the program, saying that it draws on an ultra-conservative version of Islam – which not so different from Al-Qaeda’s own.

The spokesman for the Saudi minister of interior General Mansour Turki (2R) is given a tour alongside other media representatives of a new centre the for the rehabilitation of suspected "terrorists" and potential al-Qaeda recruits in Riyadh on April 9, 2013.(AFP Photo / STR)

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